In 1979 he moved to German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ), Heidelberg, Institute of Virology, Section DNA Tumor Viruses (Gerhard Sauer) for doctoral studies.

[7] In 1988 he moved to the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP), Vienna, Austria to work as a Junior Scientist until 1995.

From 1995 to 2003 Martin Zenke was a Research Group Leader at Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine (MDC) in Berlin, Germany.

Martin Zenke’s seminal work is depicted and referenced in Lewin’s Genes IX,[18] the standard molecular biology textbook.

[7][9][10][13] He found that the v-erbA oncogene is a loss of function version of the c-erbA/thyroid hormone receptor and acts as a dominant negative transcriptional repressor.

The DC work is being followed mainly in the mouse system,[22][23] to study gene circuitries of DC development and function using RNA-Seq, ChIP-seq, ATAC-seq, chromosome conformation capture (4C) and CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing,[24] and more recently in the human system using induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells).

Martin Zenke also worked also on technology development: Automatic DNA sequencing,[29] and gene delivery into cells.